Hightail
 |
|
| Industry | Technology |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2004 |
| Headquarters | Campbell, California |
|
Key people
|
Ranjith Kumaran (CEO) |
| Website | www.hightail.com |
Hightail – formerly YouSendIt – is a cloud service that lets users send, receive, digitally sign and synchronize files. YouSendIt.com and YouSendIt Inc. were founded in 2004; the company renamed itself Hightail in 2013.
The company's early focus was on helping users send files that were too large for email; it started adding features and plug-ins for businesses in 2007. The service grew quickly, and the firm raised $49 million in funding between 2005 and 2010. The service can now be used via the web, a desktop client, mobile devices, or from within business applications with a Hightail plugin.
In May 2015, the company launched Hightail Spaces, designed to encourage creative professionals from conception of an idea to delivery.
Hightail was founded as YouSendIt Inc. in 2004 by three cofounders: Ranjith Kumaram, Amir Shaikh and Khalid Shaikh. In its early years, Amir pursued advertising revenues, Jimmy Vienneau managed business development, Francis Wu created the graphic design including the logo, while Kumaran focused on the user experience and Khalid did technical work. By May 2004, the company had 300,000 users and was growing 30 percent each month. That September, Cambrian Ventures invested $250,000. At first, YouSendIt was mainly used to send large files, such as photos or audio files, which were too large for the file-size limits set by email providers at the time.
$5 million in funding was raised in August 2005. Afterwards there was a falling out between the founders. Within a few years, Khalid and Amir Shaikh left the company, while Kumaran stayed in a product management and marketing role. In 2011, Shaikh plead guilty to making denial of service (DoS) attacks on the website for the YouSendIt service between December 2008 to June 2009.
Ivan Koon took over as CEO and YouSendIt continued to raise a total of $49 million. YouSendIt grew as file recipients saw how the service works, reaching 100,000 paying users and 8.5 million registered users by March 2009. In January 2011, YouSendIt Inc. acquired a developer of Microsoft Outlook add-ons, Attassa, and an iPhone app developer, Zosh.
In May 2012, a former AOL and Yahoo! executive, Brad Garlinghouse, was appointed as CEO. He refocused the company on file sharing and remote document access, placing it in competition with Dropbox Inc. and Box Inc. Hightail began advertising against competitors Dropbox and Box with slogans like "Your files should be neither Dropped nor Boxed".
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Wikipedia